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Monday, January 7, 2019

An Anniversary, A Book, and a World of Spirits

Before I begin, I want to
acknowledge I haven’t blogged much over the passed year. That is because I was
writing a book, _Living Spirits: A Guide to Magic in a World of Spirits_ that
book is now complete and is available. So hopefully I’ll be blogging more soon.
If you’ve enjoyed my blog in the past you’ll probably enjoy the book, so please
order a copy. If you want more info, this post is actually going to talk about
it a bit.

The late December/early
January has presented the anniversaries of some cool posts.

But our big January Anniversary
was January 5th 2017. That was when we posted the first post in our
Beginning Conjuration series, an 8-part series introducing ways to interact
with several types of spirits. The series was conceptualized as a sort of free
mini-e-book serialized over 8 posts.

People seemed to like the
series. Some comments as people reposted it included:

“Comprehensive, and all
around excellent, thematically linked series of blog posts on the subject of
spirit conjuring by BJ Swayne. Enjoy.” – C. Degraffenreid

and

“Over the recent days, BJ Swayne has been making available a series of
introduction to conjure magick posts that make the fundamentals of "DOING
MAGICK" and "doing magick right" available to folks just getting
into this thing, from the perspective of someone who gets it, whose done it,
and who has reaped the rewards. He's one of my favorite magicians, and he's
just giving this stuff away.” – Fr. Rufus Opus

The series was pretty cool, if I’m allowed to say that myself.

So cool that I thought, “I
should expand this, tie it together more, flesh it out into something more
workable and complete, people can read the short form for free and if they like
it, an expanded form will be available to buy as a book.”

So you might think “So
you’re book is your blog posts?” Well, no it isn’t. I revised and expanded
seven of the original eight posts as part of the project, significantly
expanded, and added more ritual instructions. I also wrote a ton of new
material, additional chapters, and four appendices for practical work.

The original project was
about 25 typed pages, which would have been about a 40 page book. The final
project was a book of over 350 pages.

Here is the table of
contents. You can compare it to the list of the original 8 topics and also see
if it sounds like stuff you’d find interesting.

I A Spirit Haunted World
........................................................................................11

II What Is Conjuration?
...........................................................................................17